dc mom/policy wonk's musings on work, parenthood, gender, politics, and the rest of life

November 05, 2004

Values

I found some more maps of the Presidential vote at the Big Picture. I particularly like the population density map, which adjusts the coloring for the density of people in different areas. It's a nice response to the people out there who seem to think that because the county by county map of the US is overwhelmingly red, that means the overwhelming majority of people voted for Bush.

I'm also getting tired of hearing journalists and bloggers say that the people who voted based on their values voted for Bush. Some of us have values that include tolerance and social justice and peace and voted based on these values.

There's a lot of discussion out there (see the New York Times and Salon for examples) about whether the gay marriage issue -- and Gavin Newsom's decision to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in particular -- cost Kerry the election. It may well have -- and if it didn't, it wasn't because the Christian Right didn't try. I think Barney Frank is deluding himself in thinking that if Newsom hadn't thrown open the doors of San Francisco's city hall, the Christian Right would have quietly accepted the Massachusetts ruling. The dramatic photos would have been in Boston and Provincetown and they would have been a few months later, but they still would have been front-page news, for better or worse.

And here's a bit of encouraging electoral news that I had missed: Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post that "72 percent of the voters in the Bush state of Florida and 68 percent in the Bush state of Nevada voted on Tuesday for initiatives that raised the minimum wage."